A (2:18)

Yeah, those guys are amazing.

B (2:20)

Yeah.

E (2:20)

So growing up, played basketball and it must have been, I don't know if it's grade school or maybe junior high. We called a timeout. We hurried up, told the refs we're playing trick play. We went back out and lined up at the wrong Basket. And so the other team lined up at the wrong basket, and I lined up in the back court and just walked down and did a layup.

A (2:41)

That's awesome. Yeah, you still remember it. You had to tell the refs, though, because otherwise they'd been like, you're in the wrong basket.

E (2:47)

Correct. And so would all the fans and everything.

A (2:49)

Jordan.

D (2:51)

Oh, you know, I'm kind of old school, I guess, on this one, but Mizzou's having such a strong football season. I might just say a good old fashioned onside kick. And I love it when we get, you know, an onside kick that's just not expected at all. You know, you're maybe early in the game, you're not seeing it coming. It doesn't seem like there's a reason. And all of a sudden, special teams just pull something off. I love that.

A (3:10)

I a good. That's the thing about the NFL now is they're no longer a surprise. You can't do them till. I like a. I'm like you. I like an onside kick in the first quarter where you're just, hey, let's just. Let's just try to get it right back. So let's shift from trick plays and we'll talk about a little bit of combining repro technologies to get to my goals. And I'll say we look at other industries and the swine industry in particular. You have terminal and maternal herds, and we don't see that as often in the commercial cow calf segment, but partially it's because of how we wean and sell calves. But we do see herds that are trying to produce. I want the best calf that's gonna go to the feed yard and the best heifer that will stay in my herd. It's really challenging. What are some tools and technologies that I could use if I wanted to have a terminal and maternal herd? And Jordan, I'll go to you first.

D (4:06)

Yeah, you know, it's a great question, because I think we've got such strong pressure now to produce a marketable calf that works in a. In a, you know, conventional feeding system. Right. I mean, all the market signals right now are make them as big and as heavy as we possibly can. You know, we need all the beef that we possibly can out of the size of the coward that we have. And unfortunately, some of those goals are, in, at least in the long run, a little antagonistic to what we actually need in cows. You know, I mean, even if all you talk about is just the simplistic body size piece of it, you Know, there's a strong case to be made for having a more moderated cow size while all the signals are telling us to make the steers as big as we possibly can. Right. So even if you just think about that one little trait, they're pulled way, way far apart in terms of what is optimal in a cow calf versus a feedlot system. So, you know, probably the thing that we're not using enough of, quite frankly, is crossbreeding. Right. As an industry, we produce so few crossbred calves, and if we could design some breeding systems that actually, you know, resulted in some more effective use of crossbreeding, I think we'd really do ourselves a lot of good just in this one specific area.

A (5:16)

Yeah, I think that that would certainly help, Bob.

C (5:20)

Yeah, you know, we've got the. It's exactly what Jordan said. We've got the challenge of. In the same group of cows. We're trying to produce the next generation of, of cows as well as, as our feeder calf population. And, and, and they're not perfectly aligned. But. So if you were a large enough herd, you could have a separate herd that's really the maternal herd and the rest of the herd is terminal. That takes a pretty. I mean, that takes a really large herd to really justify that kind of division of breeding plans. But with artificial insemination, you can do that. You can use, you know, a set of. You can select bulls that you're going to use for artificial insemination that really is aimed at producing your replacement animals, your replacement heifers, and either natural service or other AI bulls for the terminal. And then you add sex semen, which then highly skews it towards sex semen. Trying to select for replacement heifers, that has real potential. Now, Jordan probably knows better than anybody that looks so good on paper, but there are some challenges to implementation.

B (6:27)

Yeah. So how do I do that? Because I know I'm going to get lower conception rates with sex semen. So that's going to hurt. That means I got to AI even more cows to be able to get the number of heifers that I need. So how do I make that? How do I make that functional in my operation?

D (6:43)

Well, if you think a little bit about what the dairy industry has done in the last few years, not that we necessarily want to do what they do in every single way because we've got some different constraints that we could talk about, but if you look at what they've done, they're essentially identifying the top percentage of the cowherd to breed with Holstein semen to make the replacement heifer. And then the lower end of the cow herd, let's say the lower third of the cow herd is all being bred to beef sires. And we always hear about beef on dairy, beef on dairy, beef on dairy. Right. But it's important to realize that that's kind of come about in large part because of sex semen and the ability to go make these Holstein heifers with sex semen. So one of the things I think about a lot as well, we don't necessarily have to do everything exactly the same way that they're doing it. And in a lot of ways we probably shouldn't. But there are some major opportunities with the same kind of technology on the beef side. Right. Let's say I do artificial insemination and maybe I breed, you know, all of the cows with sex sorted semen to have a maternal type of offspring first service. And then all the bulls that get turned out for the remainder of the season are terminal.

A (7:52)

Right.

D (7:52)

I mean that, that, that's one system.

C (7:53)

Yeah. And one of the things I like about that kind of system is we've said on this show many times I like my replacement heifers to come from those that are born early. And then by definition all of my heifers are going to be born from those early matings. And, and it does a couple of things. It just age wise they are more likely to reach puberty and be ready for the next breeding season. But hey, they, their, their dam was cycling early in the breeding season. Their dam stuck to an artificial insemination. If there's any heritability at all, then we're, we're stacking generations upon generations that, that fit that system. So yeah, again, on paper it looks really good and good enough that I think we ought to really take a look at it. But I'm still. It's so good. Why isn't everybody doing it yet?

B (8:37)

Yeah, well, okay, so if I'm going to breed all my early calving cows to, for heifers, which I on the repro side, I get that. But then those are also my biggest calves that we need to sell. So now I'm giving up a lot of weaning weight by using those cows and breeding those, the heifers and all of my late calving cows with my terminal sire are going to be, they're smaller or younger when I wean them. So now I got a problem there. I'm giving up some weaning weight. So it's the offset with repro Is that worth it?

D (9:12)

Well, it's a great, it's a great question and maybe just to put some pencil to these kinds of ideas. Right. I think we often say that a beef calf from birth to weaning is going to gain, let's say between two and two and a half pounds a day. So you start Talking about these 21 day differences in calf age, that's 40, 50 pounds. I mean that's a lot of pounds. The number one thing that makes a calf, you know, way more at wean is just how old that calf is at the time of weaning, if we're really honest about it. So, so I always try to mention that because that is the hidden cost of using sex sorted semen. That is the, the, the real one to consider. Yeah, it costs a little bit more, the conventional semen, we know that. But if you, if you drop that conception rate, you know, to the first service down substantially, that really costs you in pounds of caffeine. I mean it really does. And so we've been trying to make systems that work better with sex semen. Another way to do that is just to identify the cows and that are going to get good conception rates with sex semen and then to use conventional semen on those that, that, that aren't.

C (10:15)

So here I'm going to throw out my idea and then you tell me what you think. So on typical, you know, not sex sorted semen in cows that are cycling, I would expect to get 60 to 70% of them to stick to an AI insemination. Are you comfortable with that number or would you use a different one?

D (10:33)

Yeah, so I think in cows that are cycling prior to the start of the breeding season, to be honest, it might be slightly higher than that. It might be easily 70%. There's some bull related considerations and things like that too, but you know, it's not unheard of to go get a 60% pregnancy rate across an entire cow herd and often half those cows aren't cycling at the start. Right. So that just tells you how, how effective this technology is. But just to play the argument out a little bit. Yeah, totally. Like 70%.

C (11:01)

Yeah. Okay, so how much decrease will I get by using sex sorted semen instead of regular AI?

D (11:08)

So yeah, we used to say that you would get about three quarters of the conception rate that you would have got with conventional semen. On the average, it's probably gotten a little better than that in recent years. So it's probably 0.8 to 0.85. And so let's Say, I'm just going to whip out a calculator here. So let's say that you expected to get a 70% conception rate because you're looking at just these really exceptional animals that you're really selectively breeding. Well, that population of animals, you probably are going to be in the 50 to 60 in terms of your conception rate with sex semen with today's technology.

A (11:44)

So there's trade offs in that approach. And that leads in very well to the next topic that we were going to talk about were synchronization programs. And we've really got three main drugs that we use, so a progestin, a prostaglandin, and a gonadotropin releasing hormone, or GnRH. But luckily, in the hands of repro guys, we've come up with about 179 different ways that we can apply those three drugs. I'm ballparking it may be more than that, but we apply them in different ways and we do different things with the goal of improving that conception rate. Jordan, you've done some work in this area. Tell us a little bit about maybe what's new and what you've seen as far as administering this type of program. And you've got a specific program called 7 and 7 sync.

C (12:35)

Sure.

D (12:36)

So maybe just to set it up a little bit with respect to what we were just talking about, which is sex semen, one of the things that we know is such a challenge with sex semen is that if you put it into a cow that hasn't expressed estrus before the time of fixed time AI, her conception rates are just terrible. And we know that there's a hit in those cows even with conventional semen, I think across the literature, they're, you know, close to 30% lower than our cows that express estrus. But with sex sorted semen, it's even worse than that. So one thing that we've learned is, hey, in addition to maybe identifying specific cows that I want to use sex semen in because of their performance history or pedigree or age or whatever reason it may be, another great thing to do is just to limit the use of sex semen to only those cows that actually express estrus before the time of fixed time AI, and that could be done with something like an estrotect patch or some other form of a heat detection aid, just to help us understand that. So one approach that we started to think about a few years ago is, well, if we know that estrous expression prior to fixed time AI makes such a big Difference. And it makes especially a big difference with sex sorted semen. How do you build a protocol that really generates a really high proportion of cows expressing estrus before this time of fixed time AI and so we just sort of started to hone in on, you know, is there a simple one step, you know, one extra step approach that we could take that would really do that and get that synchrony of the estrus expression tightened down?

C (14:05)

Yeah, I, I've been intrigued with, you know, some of the newer protocols that have come out and you know, a lot of them use, you know, 14 days of progestogen exposure instead of just seven. There's some advantages to that in, particularly in those non cycling cows, but also just kind of tighten up the synchrony. And so I think what you're really aiming at, Jordan, and it kind of answers some of the things that Philip and I talked about was getting a whole system. It's not really just a synchronization protocol or it's not just the decision to use sex, semen or not. It is a whole system where you've kind of identified the cows that are good candidates and then among those cows that are good candidates, the ones that respond the best. And so you're really kind of, because this is extra money, it's a little bit less fertility, a little less success on the reproduction side, but if you really hone in on the ones that are the best bets, it starts to be, you know, yes, I've increased kind of my management, my decision making, but maybe my success is a little more palatable because we've already identified some of the reasons that this is a challenge.

B (15:08)

So I'm going to ask you a question. So I mean, we, let's say we've been AI ing cows for a while. Is there a. Are there certain cows that respond to protocol better than others, even though that, let's say almost all the other factors are the same. Is there a way I can keep track of records and know that, okay, this set of cows seem to always get bred to my first service AI whereas some, my other cows don't. There. And so is there a way to identify those cows? Are there, are there those cows in the herd?

D (15:42)

Yeah. You know, you know where I would go to trying to answer that when I, When I think about the things that really get cows bred up early, the number one thing is when did she cap last year? Yeah. So when did she kept. In the previous calving season? Because when she calved in this previous calving season, you know, early well, now she's got, you start to do the math. She's got 80 to 90 days postpartum before I start trying to breed her this year. Right. And if she calves later than that, well, she's got 20, 30, something like that, you know, it's much shorter. That's the number one driver of does she or does she not conceive back? It's just when did I set her up to calve? Last year. And so that means long breeding seasons, cause long calving seasons and then require long breeding seasons. And cause long calving seasons and then require long breeding seasons. And you get the point. It's a vicious cycle, but so controlling the length of that calving season, number one, probably by going into doing a pregnancy diagnosis early enough that you can selectively market some cows that conceived up too late and keep that calving season tightened down that way. That's probably our number one ticket to identify those cows that, you know, we're going to have good success in. And then the second biggest thing in that bucket, or second biggest bucket, you might say, is body conditions, score the cast. You know, if I've got cows in decent body condition score, meaning, you know, five and a half, six range, those cows are going to do exceptional in AI programs in all of our data sets. And, and when we're under that, you know, when we're particularly below five, you know, those cows really struggle. And so if we're, if I can control those two things, I don't necessarily worry that much about trying to create little groups of cows on paper that I have some known history of how they did in an AI program. I think I just try to control those big sources of variation, which is, you know, timing of calving, body condition, score. If I can control those two things, I'm doing pretty good.

A (17:29)

And I think that's an excellent point. Cowherd, especially breeding, is a great example of where the rich get richer. Right. So if you're, if she's calving early, she breeds early. If she calves early, she breeds early, they stay, she stays in that area. And it's hard to break out if you get on the other end of that cycle. So appreciate your thoughts on those new zinc programs. And always something new coming out and to keep an eye on in that area. But it's all in how you incorporate it into your, into your process. And speaking of process, we had a really good listener question, and the question I'll read to you is what is the best age to wean calves? Because 205 days is an industry standard. And I'm not sure if that's because it's the best or is it the most common. And we talk about adjusted 205 day weights. I looked up, guys, and the first reference I can find to 205 day weights was in 1968 when Dr. Larson was graduating from vet school. Is that close?

C (18:29)

It's kind of close.

A (18:30)

Okay, yeah, I'm just giving you grief. 1968, the Beef Improvement Federation talked about adjusting things to 205 day weights. And there is a thought that that 205 day came from an average of what producers were doing at the time. I would argue that between 1968 and today, our cows have changed, our calves have changed, our grass is probably still similar. But is that the right time? And I'll ask you guys to start Y205. Is that right? Should you go? Should you aim for that?

C (19:05)

I was alive in 1968 and I was involved in the industry as we started total performance records, TPR records, which was the predecessor to EPDs. And that's exactly right. It was kind of an average of a number of herds. And, you know, it's not a bad number. It's actually kind of a pretty typical weaning age for the, you know, the top, the earlier calving cows. That's not that uncommon, but it certainly doesn't need to be carved in stone. I think we do need to be flexible about when we wean. And one aspect of this question is, you know, what's what? So in a drought year or another time when I've got, you know, limited forage, how early could I wean? Well, it goes back to some of the things we were talking about before is how tight is the calving window. Because if my calves are spread over a hundred days, well, then the youngest calf and the oldest calf are quite different in age. If they're. If they're. Most of the cows are within 40 days of each other and all of them are within 65, 70 days of each other. It gives me some opportunities to come in and early wean. And you can actually wean beef calves pretty darn early and get them started on a nice grower ration and by pretty darn early. I've been involved in one study where we were weaning. The youngest were about six weeks of age. And you think, man, that's young. That actually works. That's not my target. That's not what I would suggest. But it is doable. So anytime past two or three months of age, you could, wean the calves. But again, am I talking about the oldest calf is 3 months of age or am I talking about the youngest calf is 3 months of age?

B (20:43)

Well, I'll say. And I'm going to kind of turn it to Dustin here to jump in. But the 205 day age is a purebred target. I mean, that is their deal for adjusting weaning weights and stuff for EPD calculations. I don't think a commercial producer should even be worried about what age they are. I think he needs to be focused on what's his cost of gain relative to what's his price slide for adding weight to those calves.

A (21:11)

Just, just to add into your point, Philip, that you have to have some standardization if we're going to compare calves from operation to operation. And that's why purebred groups use it. Dustin? Oh, I was.

E (21:23)

Yeah. My initial question is why the 205? I think you guys described that it was more just a standardized. So you can compare across, as Philip just said, the operations. Yeah, I think a few things you need to also, every operation is going to be a little different. Right. And so there could be limited forages you got to take into consideration there could be some labor issues. And one, one size I guess, doesn't fit all the operation. And so I think you're going to have to figure out what works best for your own operation.

A (21:50)

And Jordan, how does, how does this tie into the reproductive status of the herd?

D (21:55)

Yeah, so first of all, I love questions like this because I love how, you know, what works on one operation doesn't necessarily work on one other operation. But I guess I'll give you the lens I think about weaning decisions through. It's, it's basically the resources and how much I am going to have as a cost to get the additional weight on those calves when you're short on forage resources or especially when cows start to slip some in body condition score, that is a great, great trigger to wean calves and get those calves off the cow. Because just energetically it costs so much to put cow body condition back on cows. And the best way to do that economically generally is just lengthen the amount of time that that cow has as a dry cow prior to calving. We can do that with purchase, feed resources and supplementation decisions to rebuild cow body condition score. But you really got to get cows in good body condition prior to calving. And from my perspective, the number one way to do that is just get those calves pulled off a little bit earlier. Just like has already been mentioned, you know, we know how to take care of a young weaned beef calf, right? We know how to get early weaning done. But rebuilding cow body conditions for is such a, such a costly thing to do if we let it get too low. So that, that's my number one trigger for, for you know, getting weaning actually accomplished.

C (23:17)

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know, those cows are already pregnant, so we're not so much worried about this pregnancy. It's how quick will she, how what body conditions will she calf in and how quickly will she come in for the next pregnancy. But then the other thing is, remember we just said, well by late in lactation she's not producing much milk. And at the times that I would be interested in weaning those calves is when forage is limited. So it's not only the cow, it's also that replacement heifer. I'm probably stalling her out and slowing down when she's going to reach puberty. So the other reason, it's not just for the cow's benefit. It's actually particularly for my replacement heifers, but also for my, you know, if I can keep those calves on, on operation up their nutrition and then sell them a few weeks later, that's probably better than leaving them on the cow on a lower plane of nutrition. But it's sure true on my replacement heifers.

A (24:06)

Beyond a certain point, there's a strong social connection, but not a strong nutritional connection between the dam and the calf. And so leaving them on there longer may not help very much nutritionally, especially if your forage base is very low. So appreciate you guys thoughts on that and thanks for joining us Jordan. And Jordan was sponsored by Estrotect. We appreciate the discussion on reproduction and if you have a listener question you'd like us to address, you can send us an email bcisu Edu.